Tracy Corrigan is a columnist and assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph, who writes mainly on business and finance. She was previously with the Financial Times, most recently as head of the Lex Column.

Darling and Myners rebuke Obama (but will the Americans notice?)

It must be very annoying, when you are clearly leading the world on financial reform, to find that someone keeps overtaking you on the inside lane – and whizzing ahead.

But that is what keeps happening to the UK government.

Last week, President Obama announced his radical "Volcker plan", named after the 82-year-old former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. If enacted, it would prevent banks from using their own capital to take bets on the markets – proprietary trading – and from owning hedge funds and private equity funds. The week before he announced a levy on banks to repay the cost of the bailout.

Reading between the lines of a piece by Lord Myners, the City minister, in the Guardian today, I detected a note of irritation:

"There are several options – among them a global insurance levy, the use of innovative contingent capital instruments developed in the UK, and a global transactions tax. But this problem can only be dealt with through ­global agreement, as we know all too well that banks can use gaps in regulation to game the system. We have seen that we are all vulnerable to the failures of firms in other nations, and we all benefit from the actions of national authorities to support their financial systems.

"Finding a new way to keep taxpayers from shouldering the bill for future ­bailouts will be far from easy, but the UK will continue to lead the ­international effort to do so. A global agreement on this issue would be the most ­important legacy of our response to this crisis, and it is a prize all governments have a duty to pursue."

And as Alistair Darling told the Sunday Times: “If everyone does their own thing it will achieve absolutely nothing. The banks are global — they are quite capable of organising themselves in such a way that if the regime is difficult in one country they will go to another one, and that doesn’t do anyone any good.”

These things have to be done globally, you see. Except, I guess, for the bonus tax on banks operating in the UK imposed by Mr Darling in the pre-Budget report.

Of course, Mr Darling and Lord Myners are entirely correct to argue that reform should be implemented globally, but the idea that the UK is leading the international effort seemed to pass President Obama by in these last few weeks.

There is, in fact, a mechanism for global coordination and it is the Group of 20. And it is at the G20 that Gordon Brown has, apparently, been providing such effective global leadership. Yet none of these recent measures has been developed through this forum, which instead came up with a rather anodyne agreement to improve remuneration practices by spreading bonuses over three years and paying them in stock. (The banks must, at least, regret lobbying quite so hard on this issue at the time, given the rather more punitive route that is now being followed.)

The reality is that the global consensus on financial reform the government continues to espouse publicly is collapsing – even though there is a financial services seminar hosted by Lord Myners at No 11 today to "exchange views".

What has gone wrong? US isolationism is partly to blame. A lot of the time it isn't malicious, they just forget about other countries. There are two particularly telling moments in Andrew Ross Sorkin's book on the financial crisis, Too Big to Fail. The first is when British regulators are trying to get hold of someone in the US to point out that, sorry, actually, they weren't going to let Barclays buy the failing Lehman Brothers without a bit more checking. The second revelation is the considerable shock at the global fallout from Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy (the result, in part, of the first miscommunication) because it hadn't occured to anyone that Lehman had a lot of operations in the UK and Japan, where bankruptcy laws would make an orderly run down very difficult (duh!).

This all happened during the Bush administration, but on this issue, at least, not much has changed. The British government thinks it is leading a global push for reform. Yet America is doing its own thing, and the City's rules are mostly made in Brussels.

It doesn't exactly inspire confidence, but at least it will be something to chat about at Davos.